sliding backwards

I've plenty of hoarded bits of paper in various boxes around the flat documenting my writing at various stages over the last fifteen years but I'll have to have a poke in some cupboards when down in parentsville to get a few samples of my handwriting from various earlier points for comparison. I assume that the period of peak legibility of my handwriting is far in the past and was probably more likely to have occurred during the later years of school when there was far less of a rush to make notes (and it was far more common to be copying something down or taking dictation) than at uni, when the contents of OHP displays, blackboarded scribbles and lecturaic mutterings all had to be captured as best as possible in the very short time available (especially when simultaneously attempting to coherently re-render the relevant accompanying diagrams and drawings) and on increasingly cheap paper. When writing slowishly and in capitals I can achieve something which is probably universally readable (though I do sometimes worry about the ability of the Royal Mail's OCR software to discern an H from and N and a 1 from an I or an l on the fronts of envelopes if I've written rather than (electronically) printed (as opposed to the increasingly-archaic use of 'printed' to mean 'written, but not in joined-up writing') an address) if not exactly neat and can still do reasonably presentable stuff if I slow down properly but the fact that I haven't made a determined effort to occasionally practise writing just for the sake of it since I last noted (and possibly commented on blip) the degree of untidiness of my writing means that I was surprised again yesterday evening when scribbling a rough draft of the last few days' write-ups at how shit my longhand is becoming when in any sort of rush or under any sort of non-ideal conditions, non-ideal conditions in this particular case being the relative smallness of the notepad and the shallow depth of the lines. A squared pad is not ideal for word-notes but I've always quite liked squared-paper notepads for when any sort of non-word note-taking is required; my drawing has always been far worse than my writing and needs all the guidelines it can get. I tend to forget how much I still always write a bit each day in office-notebooks thought they are generally always written in list-form and hardly ever as full sentences and certainly not whole paragraphs. I can still read this sort of stuff easily enough when transcribing it but that was when it was still relatively fresh in my mind; after a few years it might take a bit longer to work out what a particularly scrawled word was meant to be.